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Honey, I Shrunk our Logo.

Sep 14th 2010

What happens when you take an engineer, a blonde and a running Ute and put them in a lab? A really random, albeit cool experiment.

Randy Polson, a senior optical engineer at the U of U took it up on himself to etch the school's logo onto a chip of silicon. The cool part? The chip is approximately 2/5 of an inch square, about 70 microns across. To put that in perspective: hat's 70 millionths of a meter, less than three one-thousandths of an inch and more or less the same diameter of a single strand of blonde hair.

A beam of electrons was used to etch the extremely detailed logo, which is no more visible than a blurry speck to the naked eye. Only a scanning electron microscope, the same devise used to create the image, reveals the entire precision and detail of the logo.

Polson noted the logo took less than hour to design, while ironically, adjusting and refining the microscope to prepare it for the process took months. Polson spends the majority of his time assisting private and university researchers use the microscope, which is mainly used for fabricating nanowires and components for non electronics in a variety of fields spanning from pharmaceuticals and metallurgical engineering.

All in all kind of mind blowing that something so detailed can be created in such a microscopic size. But the real question? What possessed Polson to do this? Stick figures apparently. "The software that came with the microscope included some stick-figure demos. I thought, 'Hey, I can do better than a stick figure.'"

And that he did.

The image magnified to be visible to the naked eye on the left, squint really hard and compare it to the single strand of my hair on the book in the photo on the right. Yeah. The logo is that big (errr, small).